wrote Mark Twain, “have been greatly exaggerated.” True here as well, but only slightly. Autopsy The lines from Nick Cave’s song, “Hallelujah,” sum it up: My typewriter had turned mute as a tomb And my piano crouched in the corner of my room With all its teeth bared Change “piano” to “Gilgamesh” and there’s not [...]

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero, Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man ~ 7. This [...]

In recent years, postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. In his book In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history. –Wikipedia: “History“ –the [...]

I don’t discuss my years as an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL, a.k.a. ESL) specialist much on these pages, mainly because there are no ESOL students at my high school. But the experience of being a second teacher in the content-area classroom when I wore this hat? That’s some good fodder for thinking [...]

An interesting issue: A student posts a reflective entry including YouTube video on a class history blog. The video creator is an anti-Semitic apologist for Germany in WW II. The student wrote two remarks that offended him. First, Today, there are still some racists believing in anti-Semitism just like Hitler. We cannot say they are [...]

Unknown News | Lies from the Bush-Cheney administration Partisan? Yes. But also supported by documentary evidence. Could be a resource for Animal Farm, etc. Squealer doesn’t only symbolize Stalinist distorters of the truth, after all.–Clay Political News, Blogs, Humor featuring Republicans, Democrats, Independents and More For social studies and contemporary issues teachers looking for a [...]

Sick of students embedding full-length videos on their blogs and calling that “active learning”? Scenemaker is one answer to upping the bar for “video commentaries.” Here’s an example from the middle of a YouTube clip I love about the joys of bachelorhood: And here’s another about its follies: I wonder how easy it is to [...]

Bing, Cheryl, Cindy, Patrick, Lynne, Christina: I just replied to your comments on the “Missionary Summer” post (sorry, finals prep week). We’ve got the makings right now for a pretty diverse Language Arts collaborative network, just amongst ourselves (plus Chris in Honolulu, who’s traveling in Latin America right now). I hope we can transfer these [...]

I use the term blog-writer advisedly. I’m catching up on responding to all my learners’ blogs, using Diigo to leave “teacher-y” comments on sticky-notes that only they can see–which also makes for a great collection of sentence-correction examples on my teacher Diigo bookmarks page–and I come across this post from Lynn: Quiet Souls: the Living [...]

Illustration of Crown Publisher’s 1947edition of Gulliver’s Travels by Luis Quintanilla Maybe it’s because I’ve been wearing too many hats lately: unofficial Tech Coordinator and adviser to our admin, English dept chair, classroom teacher, Moodle and WordPress MU administrator, significant other of a good girl who deserves a good Other; Maybe it’s because that $100 [...]